We have experienced another hard week of gun violence in America. For me, it has been a week of intense emotions – heavy emotions as well as joy and hope. How do we escape the doom loop? How do we stop partaking when it is dished up to us from all sides of the media and culture that we swim in?
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A checklist for all of us
Mar 22 2020
My checklist on my computer monitor
Thank you for showing up at my blog, and more importantly, for showing up as the body of Christ in our many contexts.
We have been smacked down by this pandemic. To make it through will require all of us, each one of us. It will also require all of us, our whole selves.
I keep a sticky note on my computer monitor with my personal checklist:
- Physical
- Emotional
- Mental
- Spiritual
It’s a reminder, especially when I am stressed or overwhelmed, to go through my checklist, take stock of these dimensions of myself, and to devote attention and care to all of these capacities. This is more than self-care, it is self-equipping. We need all of us individually to serve all of us collectively.
As I am able, I will return as soon as possible to each of these “checklist capacities” in future posts, perhaps collaborating with some guest bloggers.
I’ll keep this short, because I want to offer you this five-minute meditation in song and images that affirms that “Everything is Holy Now” (photos are by Christine Valters Paintner, AbbeyoftheArts.com, and the song “Holy Now” is by Peter Mayer). This is true within us, and between us.
https://youtu.be/6VGastsEkyo
Be well, keep learning and stay connected.
Rebecca Stoltzfus
‘Even in darkness, ever-rising joy’
My 17-year-old self
Marvin Blickenstaff was my piano professor at Goshen when I began as a first-year student in the fall of 1979. Seeing him, and listening to his teaching and performance, transported me back to my 17-year-old self – a strange and vivid experience that was both disorienting and orienting.
‘Freedom for everyone’
Every day is a good day to learn a little more about history. Today, Juneteenth, is an especially good day to listen to a story that has shaped our present day through a long and painful struggle for freedom. In the words of Opal Lee, the grandmother of Juneteenth, the freedom we celebrate through the telling of this story is freedom not only for enslaved people, or Black people, or Texans, but for everyone.